Goals

I’m not one to normally set goals but I do have a few.

• Learn a foreign language
• Learn to play a musical instrument
• Get involved in the Debian project ( www.debian.org )
• Create a nice home in Wollongong
• Finish some of my projects

I guess thats pretty reflective of my status as a “5″ right?

Engaged!

Elana and I are engaged!!!

Fridge Dramas

Having a lot of problems with our fridge and I have been trying to fix it myself so now I know a lot more about fridges then I ever wanted to. For instance did you know that a frost free fridge stays frost free by using a heating element to melt all the frost off the fins in the back of the fridge. Ours is supposed to heat up for about 30 minutes once every 10 hours.

But it doesn’t! As a result ice builds up where it is not designed to. After a few weeks air stops flowing into the fridge from the freeze since it is blocked with a slab of ice. As a consequence all the food in our freezer was fine but all the food in the fridge went off and since the thermostat is in the fridge not the freezer the whole unit runs 24 hours a day.

Check out the before and after photos of the ice. The before photo is after about 4 hours of defrosting. Before that I couldn’t get the back panel of the freezer off. The after photo is in another 4 hours and a lot of hair dryer work.

You can see the heating element at the bottom of all the pipes in the second photo. It was pretty obvious this wasn’t working and it could only be one of three components.

1. The element itself (unlikely) .

2. The defrost thermostat. That’s attached to the cool pipes in the top right corner of the second image. It makes sure that the heater only runs when there is actually frost build up.

3. The defrost timer. This is a device that has 4 terminals and acts like a switch that changes state for 30 minutes every 10 hours.

I shorted out the terminals on the defrost timer to bypass it as per the circuit diagram on the back of the fridge and bam the heater started up and ice started rapidly turning to steam! So it was number 3!

Here is what it looks like I found it under the panel that holds the temperature control in the back of the fridge compartment. You can manually turn the red rubber bit to advance the timer in and out of defrost mode.

Not to give up early I then pulled this thing apart and found myself with 6 cogs and 3 tiny axles on the floor. I soldered some dry terminals inside the thing and then spent an hour getting all the cogs back in the right places. It actually works by rotating an odd shaped circle using a brush-less motor geared right down. The odd shaped circle pushes different metal terminals together during its 10 hour revolution.

I put it back in the fridge and it started ticking!! FIXED!

1 week later it stopped again. Guess i will have to spend $70 and buy a replacement part

- Jared

Beating Boredom

We were bored tonight so we decided to write a blog together. We could write about how Jared didn’t get ready in time when Elanas parents came to visit today

We are not sure what we should write about in a “blog” since we havn’t jumped on the blogging bandwagon yet. Elana wants to write about the boring stuff we do, “went to woolworths this morning…” Jared isn’t so sure…

So here are some photos

This is our friendly little cat his name is Yuki which means snow in Japanese.

And this is us on the day we moved to our new place.